When the directors of The Second City’s latest mainstage revue asked the cast what they wanted to cover in the show, Monica Garrido Huerta said three things. “I said I need to be gay, I need to speak Spanish, and I love Jesus.”

The show in question, World’s Gone Wild, opened in March with an all-new cast, including Huerta. This job is a dream come true and a full-circle moment for the Dora-nominated artist. Fourteen years ago, when she moved to Toronto from Monterrey, Mexico, the first show she watched was at The Second City. Now, she gets to perform there six days a week, something she’s still wrapping her head around. 

“I cannot believe that this is my job, and that I get to do what I love every night, except Mondays,” she says. 

In Mexico, Huerta was already immersed in theatre and sketch. When she moved to Toronto, she started taking improv classes at The Second City to practice her English. “Having English as a second language, sometimes I will be shy if I make a mistake and feel bad,” she says. “In improv, a mistake is an opportunity…it’s something that is celebrated.”

Fast forward many years later, Huerta found out that she was cast in World’s Gone Wild while on vacation with her family in Spain, in front of the iconic Sagrada Familia Basilica.  “It was really beautiful to get the news with my actual family, because they had never seen me perform in this country,” she says. A month ago, her family came to Toronto and watched World’s Gone Wild. To their delight, Huerta speaks Spanish several times throughout the show.

“I love using my first language, because that’s where I lived most of the time,” she says. “It was really nice when they were like, yeah, we’ll support you in doing that.”

We’ve heard from other Second City comedians about just how intense it can be to create these mainstage revues. The cast is not just performing—for months before the opening, they are writing and refining every sketch, song, and character—both off-stage and in front of audiences, using their input to shape the show.

“This is, I think, one of the biggest gifts, because you’re writing with your audience. You get feedback right away as you’re going,” Huerta says. “The audience is always right, for me. So when they need a little bit more energy from you, you give it to them.”

In one of Huerta’s sketches for World’s Gone Wild, she plays Jesus—and the audience gets to ask her anything—an open-ended prompt that, as you can imagine, has gone to some interesting places. While she’s had her fair share of offbeat audience suggestions to work with, Huerta loves the fact that each night is different. 

“I’m a double Taurus, so I love consistency, but as an artist, I also like a little bit of, ‘we don’t know what’s going to happen,’” she says. “That’s live comedy, that’s live theatre. That’s what I crave, I love. I think that connection—there’s nothing like it.”

For Huerta, being part of The Second City’s mainstage ensemble may be a dream job, but it is still an undoubtedly demanding gig. With eight shows a week, the cast is living and breathing World’s Gone Wild for months. This rigorous schedule can take a toll on your body and voice—especially for a physical comedian. 

There are so many moments in World’s Gone Wild where Huerta’s funny facial expressions or a perfectly timed movement will have the audience in stitches—even if she’s not the star of the sketch. As someone who knows movement is integral to her craft, she’s learned the importance of taking care of her body and knowing her limits. For her, this means stretching for 25 minutes before every show, going to the gym, and making choices on stage that aren’t going to hurt her the next day.

“Because English is my second language, my physicality has become a lot of the way I communicate, because if I don’t remember a word or I don’t know how to express certain things, my face will tell you everything,” she says. “When we’re pitching these ideas, you need to be conscious that you’re gonna do this eight times a week for months, so what are you okay with your body doing?”

But even when she’s exhausted, Huerta tells us that nothing invigorates her like the energy of the stage.

“Being on stage is like my heart, my soul, everything is on fire in the best way,” she says. “This energy that I always have inside of me, I can finally channel it. It is what I’ve been training for for years—physically, artistically, mentally, emotionally.”

Outside of World’s Gone Wild, Huerta’s love for theatre runs deep. She’s had roles in Buddies in Bad Times’ Youth/Elder project, Quote Unquote Collective’s Universal Child Care, and Tarragon Theatre’s El Terremoto. But beyond these accomplishments, theatre has been life-changing for Huerta on a personal level. She came out to her family through her first solo show, aptly named The Cunning Linguist. Based on her own experiences, the show follows Monica, a young Mexican woman who realizes that God made her queer, as she moves to Toronto with him as her unlikely sidekick.

“It was the most vulnerable thing to do, to be like, I’m going to tell you my story, and I’m going to let you see me completely, and I’ll still be really funny about it,” Huerta says. “It made me a better performer. It made me a stronger writer. It made me a more confident person, because I was not hiding at all.”

The Cunning Linguist was a show nine years in the making. It was first created through the Emerging Creator Unit at Buddies In Bad Times Theatre in 2016 and finally ran onstage at Factory Theatre last year. But during that time, Huerta was still creating, and was still obsessed with telling queer stories.

Her short films, most recently the queer zombie horror-comedy Last Call, have premiered at the Inside Out 2SLGBTQ+ Film Festival—an event that always kicks off Pride Month for her. Whether it’s The L Word, Alex and Paige’s relationship in Degrassi: The Next Generation, or her own work, Huerta’s love for queer media truly runs deep. “I love telling queer stories. Literally, my mission in life is just to tell queer stories. It’s the gift that my 10-year-old [self] needed.”

That, she tells us, is exactly what her dream is as an artist. To keep doing this forever…literally. “My biggest artistic dream is literally just to do this until I die, and then when I die, I’ll do it in the afterlife, and then when I reincarnate, I will do it again, over and over again. I just want to keep doing this,” she says. “There’s nothing in my life that makes me as happy and excited and calms me down in the same way as being on stage.” 

See Monica Garrido Huerta in The Second City Toronto’s World’s Gone Wild, on stage now.